4/5/2006 1

CS 160: Lecture 18

Professor John Canny

4/5/2006 2

Outline

Some basic concepts from social psychology

CSCW: Computer-supported Cooperative Work

Case study: video-conferencing

4/5/2006 3

Social Psychology

Why study it?

It helps us understand human collaboration, which is one of the most difficult areas of HCI, but also the most important.

Most “knowledge work” is collaborative at some level. Organizations can be more or lessthan the sum of their parts.

4/5/2006 4

Mere presence effects

Simply being near others can lead to changed performance, e.g. Triplett’s fishing observations.

How would fishermen in a group perform differently from individuals?

4/5/2006 5

Mere presence effects

A: They catch more fish per fisherman !

But specifically, whichaspects of performancechange?

4/5/2006 6

Mere presenceStress, anxiety or stimulation increase physiological arousal, and arousal speeds up behavior.

The presence of others pushes these buttons…

But increased speed can also increase errors, so it can be bad on difficult tasks.

4/5/2006 7

Mere presenceIncreased arousal generally helps learning

But, it also heightens response to well-learned stimulae (Zajonic and Sales):

Its an“alpha helix”

4/5/2006 8

Mere presenceMere presence isn’t quite the right idea.

The presence of a blindfolded subject didn’t increase arousal, and didn’t affect performance.

The presence of others evaluating or competingwith us is what matters.

4/5/2006 9

Mere presence – Design Implications

Increasing the level of group “awareness” should increase mere presence effects:* Heightened arousal* Faster performance* Increased learning* More errors

Examples:* High awareness – video conferencing, phone* Medium – Instant messaging* Low awareness – Email

4/5/2006 10

Mere presence – Design Implications

What would be a good medium for:* Routine discussions? * Brainstorming? * Working on difficult tasks, e.g. programming?

4/5/2006 11

AttributionHow do we attach meaning to other’s behavior, or our own?

This is called attribution.

E.g. is someone angrybecause something badhappened, or because they are hot-tempered?

4/5/2006 12

Attribution: ourselvesLets start with ourselves, how good are we at figuring out our emotions?Schacter: it depends strongly environmental and physiological factors, and others near us.The bottom line is that we can feel strong emotion, but struggle to recognize it as happiness or anger.

4/5/2006 13

Schacter’s experimentsSubjects interacted with a confederate, confederate expressed strong emotions (happy, angry, sad).Subjects normally mirror such emotion slightly (empathy).Injecting a stimulant (epinephrine) causes a physiological state similar to strong emotion. Subjects who received it strongly mimic-ed the confederate.Most interestingly, subject’s attributed their emotions to all kinds of other factors (than the conferederate’sstate). However, knowledge of the effects of the drug reduced subject’s response.

4/5/2006 14

Attribution theory

Attribution theory: was this behavior caused by personality, or environment?Fundamental attribution error:* When I explain my own behavior, I rely on

external explanations. * When I explain others’ behavior, I’m more likely

to attribute it to personality and disposition.* e.g. other drivers are either “lunatics” (faster

than me) or “losers” (slower than me). Of course, they have the same model about you ☺…

4/5/2006 15

Attribution theory

How should you design communication systems to minimize attribution errors?

4/5/2006 16

Attribution theory – design implications

To reduce attribution errors, its important to have as much context as possible.E.g. room-scale video-conferencing, or ambient displays:

4/5/2006 17

Non-verbal communication

In real life, we use a lot more than speech (or sign language) to communicate.Non-verbal communication includes:* Gaze, eye contact* Facial expression* Gesture* Posture* Touch* Location (proxemics)* Time* Prosody (speech)

4/5/2006 18

Non-verbal communication

Which of these cues are preserved by:Email?Instant messaging? Telephony?Video-conferencing?

4/5/2006 19

Non-verbal communication

Q: What is the role of these cues in normal communication?

A: It depends totally on the role of the communication, e.g.Routine (giving information, coordinating)Persuading and being persuadedTrust, deception and negotiation…

4/5/2006 20

Routine communication

Most of what happens in most organizations.

Doesn’t seem to benefit much from non-verbal cues, and in fact there is evidence that people prefer less-rich media such as email and telephone:* Sproull and Kiesler: computer science students did

better with email than face-to-face meetings.* Connell et al.: Business employees preferred the

phone over face-to-face and email for routine communication.

4/5/2006 21

Persuasion

Seems to be strongly influenced by gaze and facial cues (Werkoven et al.).

Note: Most non-verbal cues are not consciously processed. We transmit and receive without being aware of what we are doing. Most non-verbal cues are strongly influenced by our personality and emotional state.

Facial expression is different however. We consciously manage it, and it shows very little correlation with emotional state.

4/5/2006 22

Trust and deception

Most people emit easy-to-read non-verbal cues when they try to deceive. These are the basis of “lie detector” tests. They include: * Prosodic speech variation* Skin conduction (due to sweating)* Breathing and heart rate changes* Particular body gesture cues

4/5/2006 23

Trust and deception

Facial expression on the other hand, since it is consciously managed, is a poor cue to deception. Most deception cues therefore, are “below the neck”.

4/5/2006 24

Trust and deception

Facial expression on the other hand, since it is consciously managed, is a poor cue to deception. Most deception cues therefore, are “below the neck”.

4/5/2006 25

Trust and deception

A former president:

4/5/2006 26

Trust and deception

A former president:

4/5/2006 27

Trust and deception

A former president:

4/5/2006 28

Break

4/5/2006 29

CSCW: Computer-Supported Cooperative Work

Its about tools that allow people to work together.

Most of the tools support remote work* video, email, IM, Workflow

Some tools, e.g. Livenotes, augment local communication.

Can be synchronous (live) or asynchronous

4/5/2006 30

Asynchronous GroupwareEmail: still a killer app

Newsgroups: topical messaging

Cooperative hypertext/hypermedia authoring: e.g. Wikis, Blogs

Structured messaging: e.g. Workflow – messages route automatically.

Knowledge repositories: Answergarden, MadSciNet, Autonomy…

Automation

4/5/2006 31

Blogs and WikisHybrids between mail/news and web sites.

Posting capabilities make the site dynamic.

Web presence makes it accessible+searchable

Usually create a hierarchy among the user group (posting, commenting, reading).

See e.g. swiki from Georgia Techhttp://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/swiki

4/5/2006 32

Content-Management SystemsCMSes (like Plone) go a step further.

They include fancier publishing options (templates) and site navigation widgets.

They also include more groupware features, scheduling, news, comments, etc.

4/5/2006 33

Language/Action Analysis

Early studies of CSCW noticed that human dialogue at work was “transactional”:

It comprised a few categories of “speech acts”, like ask, propose, accept, acknowledge..

i.e. user action and form of dialogue were closely coupled.

4/5/2006 34

Language/Action AnalysisSystems were built to support specific acts and to follow and help the work.

BUT: they were too restrictive.

E.g. the Coordinator forced users to identify the speech act they were using to the system.

Finally a compromise was found: Workflow.

4/5/2006 35

Workflow

Documents carry meta-data that describes their flow through the organization:* Document X should be completed by Jill by 4/15* Doc X should then be reviewed by Amit by 4/22* Doc X should then be approved by Ziwei by 4/29* Doc X should finally be received by Don by 5/4

The document “knows” its route. With the aid of the system, it will send reminders to its users, and then forward automatically at the time limit.

4/5/2006 36

Workflow

There are many Workflow systems available. Lotus notes was one of the earliest.

Workflow support now exists in most enterprise software systems, like Peoplesoft, Oracle, SAP etc.

4/5/2006 37

Knowledge repositories

AnswerGarden (Ackerman): database of commonly-asked questions that grows automatically.

User poses question as a text query:* System responds with matches from the

database.* If user isn’t satisfied, system attempts to route

query to an expert on the topic.* Expert receives query, answers it, adds answer to

the database.

4/5/2006 38

Trends

There is a trend toward “do everything” systems like Autonomy: Autonomy includes:* Automatic expertise profiling* Social networks (communities of practice)* Document clustering and categorizing* Search and browse* Automatic cross-referencing & hyperlinking

i.e. no boundary between “content management” and “people management”

4/5/2006 39

Video Conferencing

The ultimate collaboration technology of tomorrow, …since the 1940’s.

There is still steady growth in video systems, and its available on some phones now.

But growth in corporate settings has been much slower than expected. Many experiments have shown that video meetings are a poor substitute for face-to-face.

4/5/2006 40

Persuasion (Werkhoven et al., 2001)

2 participants and 1 confederate performed a collaborative taskThe confederate tries to influence the other’s choicesPersuasive power measured as the change in those choices in response to group discussion

Key result: Gaze-preserving V.C. was as good as F2FBut the non-gaze-preserving video

system was much worse

4/5/2006 41

Trust Formation (Bos et al., 2002)

3-person groups4 conditions – text, audio, video, face-to-facePlayed 30 rounds of a game called DaytraderTrust development was delayed in audio/videoDefections were more likely with video/audio than FTF communication.Little difference between video and audio

4/5/2006 42

Trust Formation (Bos et al., 2002)

Summary: the Bos system (which looks like the Werkoven one) was very poor for trust-based collaboration.

Reasons?:Gaze: the experimenters tried to faithfully reproduce gaze, but its not clear whether their design actually did.Below-the-neck cues. People usually present only face or face/shoulder images. This hides deception cues.

4/5/2006 43

Gaze distortion

Its physically impossible with standard video displays to preserve gaze for a group of people on either side of a video connection. Unfortunately, that is the most common case in commercial settings.

A

B

4/5/2006 44

Gaze distortion

Only A believes that the other person is looking at them!This is because of the Mona-Lisa effect.

A

B

4/5/2006 45

Mona Lisa Effect

0 10 20 35 50

4/5/2006 46

Other Group BreakdownsMisunderstandings, talking over each other, losing the thread of the meeting.

People are good at recognizing these and recovering from them “repair”.

Mediated communication often makes it harder.

E.g. email often escalates simple misunderstandings into flaming sessions.

4/5/2006 47

Usage issuesOur model of tele-communication is episodic, and derives from the economics of the telephone.

Communication in the real world has both structured and unplanned episodes. Meeting by the Xerox machine, or other familiar shared contexts.

Also, much face-to-face communication is really side-by-side, with some artifact as the focus.

4/5/2006 48

SolutionsSharing experiences is very important for mutual understanding in team work (attribution theory).

So context-baseddisplays (portholes)work well.

Video shows roomsand hallways, not just people or seats.

4/5/2006 49

SolutionsProps (mobile presences) address many of these issues. They even support exploration.

4/5/2006 50

SolutionsIshii’s Clearboard: sketching + presence

4/5/2006 51

MultiView Display (UCB)

12

3

Light is retroreflected toward the source in the horizontal direction.Each user has their own projector, sees their own image.

4/5/2006 52

MultiView Directional DisplayEach view is provided by a projectorThe projected image is reflected directly back in the direction of the projectorThe image can be seen at varying heights onlybehind the projectorEach user gets video from a unique camera at the other end.

4/5/2006 53

Cameras

Projectors

MultiViewDisplay

4/5/2006 54

12

3

4/5/2006 55

12

3

4/5/2006 56

12

3

4/5/2006 57

MultiView Display

The Multiview design fully preserves gaze cues between all pairs of participants, on both sides of the connection.

It also reproduces everything that’s visible above the table at the other end (same deception cues as a face-to-face meeting).

Goal is to see if we can reproduce persuasion and trust cues.

4/5/2006 58

SummarySocial psychology principles for design of CSCW systems: presence, attribution, deception, non-verbal communicationAsynchronous groupware: email knowledge managersDesign guidelines for collaboration systemsIssues with video-conferencing and solutionsThere is no “best collaboration technology”. The most appropriate technology depends on the task, e.g.:* Routine coordination and communication* Persuasion* Trust and deception